Have you ever told yourself, “I’ll start tomorrow,” only to find yourself saying the same thing a week later? Perhaps you planned to begin an assignment early, exercise regularly, or study for an exam in advance, yet somehow the deadline arrived before you had made meaningful progress. These situations are familiar to many of us and reveal an important problem: knowing what we want to do does not always translate into actually doing it.
There is a well-known saying that action speaks louder than words. Simply saying that we want to do something is not enough to achieve success; acting on our words and putting in consistent effort is what moves us toward our goals. Many students around the world have experienced failure not once, not twice, but many times in their lives. We all set goals we want to achieve, but we often leave them unfinished because we fail to act on them. This failure is not limited to educational settings; it can also occur in our everyday work and personal lives. It does not necessarily mean that people are lazy, dishonest about their work, or unwilling to put in the necessary time. Instead, it may reflect a gap between what they want to achieve and what they actually do.
The gap between individuals’ intentions to reach a goal and their failure to take action to achieve it has been identified by psychologists as the intention-behaviour gap. The gap represents an ongoing cycle for many people, and it is not necessarily because of a lack of desire. A study suggested that as the intensity of an individual’s desire to achieve a specific goal increases, there will be very little change in their actions (Sheeran & Webb, 2016). Therefore, merely desiring to accomplish a task does not guarantee that one will accomplish the task. In this article, we will go through several factors contributing to the intention-behaviour gap.
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Procrastination
Procrastination is something that we all have done at least once or twice in our lives. Whether we have delayed our assignments until the last minute or prepared for our exams until the last day. Even after all the stress it puts us through, we still don’t change this behaviour. People attribute procrastination to laziness or lack of commitment to one’s work, but the reality is far from these judgments. This phenomenon was explained by a psychologist, Piers Steel.
He analysed a great volume of literature and combined several studies on procrastination in 2007. He found that procrastination is not linked to any of the personality traits. Instead, it is strongly related to factors such as lack of confidence in one’s own ability, finding the task unpleasant, and getting distracted by short-term reinforcement (Steel, 2007).
In addition to that, Piers also explains procrastination through Temporal Motivation Theory. According to this theory, people are more attracted to immediate comfort than to the future reward (Steel, 2007). For instance, for them, finishing an assignment three weeks prior and waiting for the reward is a distant priority, whereas the effort they have to put in is immediate. Therefore, delaying the assignment feels like an easy choice for them even though it conflicts with their long-term goals.
The Planning Fallacy
The planning fallacy refers to the time and effort a person puts in to achieve their goal. It is not always a person’s motivation that is making them not work on their intentions. Instead, it can be their negligence, as they underestimate the time and effort they need to complete a task. Buehler et al. (1994) carried out a study in which they asked the final-year students how long it would take to complete their honours thesis. The students replied that it would take an average of 34 days, which is nearly 60% less than the 56 days required to complete a thesis. Further on, even though the students were provided with a deadline to complete their thesis and had a 99% chance of success, only 30% were able to meet the deadline.
This is called the Planning Fallacy, in which people only focus on the details of the plan and forget to consider the timeline. They overlooked the time and effort their peers have given to similar tasks in the past. So, the gap between intentions and action is not always caused by poor self-discipline, but by poor management skills. The plan from the start was not set out properly, hence leading to failure.
Environmental barriers
Failure to fulfil one’s intention is not always caused by self-discipline or time mismanagement; the environment can also play a role. When our surroundings fail to support our intentions, the gap between intention and action becomes more prominent. Many of the things we do throughout the day are not the result of careful, conscious decisions. Instead, our behaviour can also be influenced by the environment around us.
According to researchers Wood and David Neal (2007), even though humans’ conscious thoughts are different, their behaviour is automatically influenced by familiar situations and surroundings. For example, reaching out to your phone when it is lying right next to you or skipping a workout because you’re unable to find your gym clothes are choices that the person takes without any conscious effort.
It all happens because of their habits and the environmental layout. When a person’s environment does not support the behaviour they want to adopt, their intention to do the task becomes limited. Here, their intention is fighting against their well-established habits, which are constantly triggered by their environment. These habits are stronger than their willpower. So, instead of trying harder to achieve a common goal, simply changing the environment or the distractors to more desirable choices is effective.
Read More: The Psychology of Time Management and Its Importance
What Actually Helps Turn Intentions into Action
Changing motivation alone will not help in closing the gap between intentions and behaviour. Instead, addressing the underlying issues causing this gap is more crucial. Some evidence-based behavioural strategies that can help in closing this gap are as follows.
1. Implementation Intention
The first strategy is implementation intention, or if-then planning. It requires a specification of a planned behaviour and the context in which it will occur. For instance, if one wants to go for a walk in the morning, he will remind himself that, if it is Monday at 7.00 am, he should put on his shoes before looking at the time. According to a meta-analysis conducted by Gollwitzer and Sheeran (2006), people who create these specific plans are more likely to achieve success and meet their goals. These plans work because they don’t rely on motivation to work. Instead, the person is reminded by the situation itself, making it easier for them to work on the plan.
2. Monitoring Progress
Secondly, monitoring progress is also found to be successful. According to the research conducted by Harkin et al. (2016), people who monitor their progress are more likely to reach their goals compared to those who do not do it. Checking the former’s process enables them to know the mistakes they had committed and the changes that they needed to make towards achieving the result, which in turn allows them to correct their plans and strategies accordingly. Moreover, through such monitoring, they will also be able to learn not to underestimate the power of time.
3. Removing Environmental Barriers
Thirdly, it is very important to remove all the things that stop someone from achieving the goals they have set. For example, if a person wants to go to the gym in the morning, they should put the gym clothes and the gym accessories in a bag the night before. So when they wake up early in the morning, they won’t have any distractions or any reasons to stay in bed.
4. Temptation Building
Lastly, another method that we can take in order to tackle the issue of habit forming is temptation building. We utilise some form of temptation to help us create a new habit. An example of this is listening to your favorite genre of music while doing exercise such as running or jogging in a park.
Conclusion
Whenever one wants to accomplish something in life, they have to make some effort. Just writing some goals on paper and then watching them remain on paper is not enough for goals to work on their own. To achieve something meaningful, one must first define goals clearly. They should set reminders, change their habits and environment, and manage their time properly. They should never fall under false temptations and instant rewards. Therefore, when we ourselves make efforts, we can close this intention-behaviour gap.
In the end, achieving a goal is not about what we want; it’s about the necessary steps we should take to turn our intentions into actions. So, the next time we set a goal, we should ask ourselves: “Are we only thinking about what we want to achieve”, or “Are we actually taking the steps to make it happen?”
Reference +
- Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366–381. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.366
- Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
- Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000025
- Sheeran, P., & Webb, T. L. (2016). The intention–behaviour gap. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10(9), 503–518. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12265
- Steel, P. (2007). The nature of procrastination: A meta-analytic and theoretical review of quintessential self-regulatory failure. Psychological Bulletin, 133(1), 65–94. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.133.1.65
- Wood, W., & Neal, D. T. (2007). A new look at habits and the habit-goal interface. Psychological Review, 114(4), 843–863. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.4.843
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